MRS 063: Victor Shepelev

This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks with Victor Shepelev who is a Ruby programmer and also a poet. He works for Verbit.ai and lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Chuck and Victor talk about his background, how Victor got into Ruby, and his latest projects.

2:18 – Victor: I broke my leg and very bored. In ‘85-‘86 and I was gaming. Since then I got into programming and have been in it for 20 years.

3:20 – Chuck: Prince of Persia.

3:26 – Chuck: What made you stick with programming?

3:34 – Victor: I think it was magically and exotic. It still fascinates me.

4:03 – Chuck: How did you get into Ruby?

4:15 – Victor: There are great several programming attitudes – but I belong to the one that just write texts that expose the meanings. I like the text. I am a poet. When I write in Ruby (not like poetry), I write texts and that is what I’m thinking about. I loved C-Plus, Plus in the early 2000’s. For me it wasn’t fully expressive enough. I tried other things and searched other options. I met Ruby and it was love at the first sight.

7:09 – Chuck: What have you done with Ruby that you are proud of?

7:18 – Victor: The project takes my time is data integrated into itself: countries, planets, famous paintings, and so on. It’s really cool.

9:49 – Chuck: Where can you find this project?

9:54: Victor – GitHub and some conferences.

10:27 – Chuck: You mentioned being in a company that does translation?

10:33 – Victor: Yes. It is written in Python.

11:11 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

11:18 – Victor: Yes, this project and last year I got into development of Ruby itself. I wasn’t that proficient. I am not contributing to the language itself but creating documentation (program language reference) and new features of Ruby.

12:40 – Chuck: What is the Ruby community like in Ukraine?

12:46 – Victor: It is pretty large. Don’t know if it is large to U.S. standards.

Meetups happens every once to twice a month in my city.

Recent years it has gotten smaller, because I don’t know if they are going to the new “hip” technology.

14:16 – Chuck: We’d have Meetups like 30-40-50 people and now it’s only 10-20.

Different companies are moving to different things that they need.

14:43 – Victor: In Ukraine I think a lot of people are doing a lot of opensource. I think it will still grow to some extent.

15:29 – Chuck: It’s not that Ruby is dying per se. Ruby hit a stride when web was hot. Now we are seeing growth in AI or IOT. For example people are reaching to Python for the mathematics and scientific side to it.

16:17 – Victor adds in his comments.

Victor: I had some high hopes for Rails.

18:14 – Chuck comments.

Chuck: It would be interesting to see bindings. See these other options come forward.